To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
Newspapers make do with the stories they have: Pit bull chases puppy into house.
Meanwhile, here in the Noggle home, Summer of the Tabby continues as one tabby chases the other around the house. Or is it vice versa?
(Link seen on Ravenwood’s Universe.)
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From a story profiling the guy behind Internet Haganah in the Washington Post called “Watchdogs Seek Out the Web’s Bad Side“:
He said he has received thousands of dollars in donations, as well as some ominous death threats. One warning came in a handwritten letter mailed to Weisburd’s house. Another letter on a Web site declared that he should be beheaded and it listed his address. For his protection, Weisburd keeps a loaded 38mm pistol in the house.
That would leave a mark, to be sure.
(Link seen on Free Will.)
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Bryan Burwell of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on the move of the Cardinals from KMOX to KTRS in his column today:
This is no frivolous enterprise. There are plenty of legitimate, practical business reasons why the Cards are mulling a change. Yet in this parochial old baseball town that clings to routine like a pit bull gnawing on a bone, change is a strange and scary place. That is a quirky little characteristic of the Midwest, where the insular mood is to keep things just the way they always are.
Tradition, the bedrock loyalists call it. Inflexibility, the mystified outsiders mock it.
Let’s reflect upon how baseball crosses generations. When I moved to St. Louis in the middle 1980s, I listened to Jack Buck and Mike Shannon calling two Cardinals World Series appearances. When I returned to Missouri after college, they were still in the broadcast booth. As a matter of fact, Jack Buck called games for the Cardinals for fifty years up until his recent death. Mike Shannon still calls games.
However, in the last couple of years, the Cardinals (singular corporate entity) has provided a number of other guys in the broadcast booth. That “See! You! Later!” guy and Wayne “When Will A Real Market Call” Hagin.
As the Cardinals has proven its flexibility by breaking its bonds to my youth, I’ve gone to fewer games. Now that the team will play in a new stadium that I don’t associate fondly with growing up and which will bear numerous names in its existence and the games will play on a new, lesser radio station, I’ll probably listen to fewer games, too.
Because the Cardinals is not a hometown team any more; it is a corporate franchise owned and operated by a company based elsewhere with no respect–none–for St. Louis and tradition other than the tradition of taking money from St. Louisans for baseball.
Of course, we insular Midwesterners wouldn’t expect the well-travelled sports columnist to embrace tradition. He’s only here in the local paper because it offered the best check for now.
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That’s right, I got my first L.L. Bean catalog today.
You know, it’s really got absolutely nothing to do with Rowan Atkinson. Now I, too, am privileged to share in that information with my other Casinoport, Missouri, brothers.
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From Bill McClellan’s online presence today:
ITALICIZE BILL’S RESPONSES, please
Unfortunately, someone forgot the Don’t include editor’s formatting remarks, dang it!
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10 Lines To Get Republican Gals — Like Ann Coulter — Into Bed.
Geez, I would add, for Republican gals like Ann Coulter, something along the lines of Hey, I see tax policies soaking the wealthy are starving you. Can I buy you a sandwich?
(Link seen on Dustbury, who is currently travelling the country and performing field research on the efficacy of the study.)
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Send me $8, and I’ll name a star after you and register it in blog post form on this blog, covered by common law copyright. And since I don’t have to waste money on the “book form” at the United States Copyright Office, I can save that filing fee and add it right to my bottom line. Boo-yah!
Perhaps I shouldn’t have brought that last bit up as it’s not a salient selling point.
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In a post on Tech Central Station, Professor Reynolds overlooks certain benefits of surveillance cameras. The professor says:
As a deterrent, at least, they were a failure. Civil libertarians fear these cameras, with some reason (my guess is that they’ll be used more to catch parking scofflaws and to dig up dirt on political opponents than to reduce crime or terrorism) but the real story is their ineffectiveness. Every cop sitting in a control room, eating doughnuts and watching monitors, could be out on the street, looking at things with his or her own eyes and in a position to do something about what he or she sees. Nonetheless, the response to the London bombings will probably include a call for more, not fewer, cameras.
That’s a mistake. As Jeffrey Rosen wrote in a superb essay published just after 9/11 (but sadly no longer available online), London’s “ring of steel” camera network never caught a terrorist…
Professor Reynolds overlooks the following benefits (to the watchers, anyway):
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A University of Alberta professor I know sent me a lengthy article he’s trying to get published, entitled: “Let’s get while the getting’s good.”
In it, Leon Craig, professor emeritus of political science, lays out a case for Alberta to declare unilateral independence. And he lays it out well.
Craig makes no bones about it.
Alberta, he says, should go it alone.
Almost overnight, we would become one of the most prosperous nations in the world.
But — and this is his key point — the main reason to secede is not because Albertans would have more money. Not that there’s anything wrong with money.
More importantly, we would create a country that reflects our own political and social beliefs, values and traditions, and our understanding of the common good.
Canada, says Craig, has been so badly governed since the Trudeau era, it has doomed itself to a Third World, banana republic fate.
When the Quebec referendum was held a decade ago, one of my co-workers predicted the biggest consequence of a free Quebec would not be one more annoying Francophone country in the world, but the states of Saskatchewan, Alberta, British Columbia, and Manitoba.
Just think, we could drive to Alaska without a passport again.
Come home to US, western Canada. You can finally charge American dollars for hockey tickets.
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The Police, “Wrapped Around Your Finger”:
Aristophanes is not your name
I know what you’re up to just the same
Because classical scholars who know who Aristophanes was also know Mephistopheles.
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Why should we make Matt Blunt president?
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Seen on the Web site of the Animal Protection Association of Missouri:
Good with children, favorite toy is a blanket and
Funny how that sentence trails off, as though the copy writer couldn’t finish it, ainna?
Current standings, Summer 2005:
Pit Bulls: 20
Sharks: 6
Alligators: 1
Sea Lions: 1
(Submitted to the Outside the Beltway Traffic Jam.)
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Well, Governor Rod Blagojevich won’t surrender his arms:
Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich put the Pentagon on formal notice Monday that he will not approve its proposed move of F-16 fighter aircraft from the 183rd Fighter Wing in Springfield to Indiana.
In a letter sent to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the governor argued that under federal law if he does not consent to the realignment, the change can not legally be made.
What do you think it means?
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I often disagree with Bill McClellan of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, but when he pans Kelo, who am I to argue? He says:
City Councilman Barry Greenberg was the only city official who attended the meeting. Good for him. On the other hand, it was awkward to see the relationship the people have with the councilman. They had to restrain their anger. He has the power to ruin them. He will be voting for or against the development plans.
I have a duty to look at these plans, he said solemnly.
Why? That’s what I wondered. Since when do local officials have the responsibility to decide whether to use eminent domain to let developers take away homes and businesses? By the way, ideologically, this seems to be an equal opportunity crime. It was the liberal wing of the U.S. Supreme Court that recently declared local governments have that right, but the mayor of Maplewood is a former radio executive who yanked the Dixie Chicks off his station when they criticized George W. Bush. It’s as if both sides of the political spectrum have come together to agree on one thing: Money rules.
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Family sets up murder suspect’s surrender:
Kevin Johnson, the suspect sought in the shooting death of a Kirkwood police sergeant, was arrested without incident in north St. Louis County on Friday afternoon, police said.
Johnson, 19, was the subject of an intense manhunt after Tuesday’s shooting of police Sgt. William McEntee. McEntee was responding to a call in Kirkwood’s Meacham Park neighborhood just before 8 p.m. when he was shot several times.
Johnson surrendered at the Ventura Village Apartments on Jacobi Drive and Nemnich Road, police said.
Northwoods Police Chief Greg Moore said Friday night a detective in his department received a call from one of Johnson’s family members just after 5 p.m. Friday.
Moore said Johnson “wanted to turn himself in without any fanfare and without being harmed.”
The detective who received the call and another officer drove to pick up the family member, then headed to Ventura Village Apartments, Moore said.
When they arrived, the relative directed them to an apartment near the back of the complex. Moore said another relative greeted them at the door.
Johnson was sitting on a couch in the apartment with his hands in front of him, Moore said.
Moore described Johnson’s demeanor as “humble and cooperative” as he was taken into custody.
Well, in an alternate universe, the one painted by racial agitators, the cops don’t need an excuse to kill a young black man, and when one is suspected of shooting a middle-aged white police man, the police will surround his hideout and kill him and some nearby blacks in a hail of retaliatory gunfire.
That didn’t happen in this situation; as a matter of fact, the aphrension of the suspect was smooth and without conflict. Perhaps we don’t live in the racial agitators’ alternate universe after all, but this possibility hasn’t inspired any marches.
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Jury finds heavy smoking to be grounds for eviction:
In a case that tobacco law specialists say is one of the first of its kind in the nation, a Boston Housing Court jury ruled that a South Boston couple could be evicted from their rented water-view loft for heavy smoking, even though smoking was allowed in their lease.
The landlord who rented the Sleeper Street unit to Erin Carey and Ted Baar ordered them out within a week last November, after neighbors complained of the smoke odors filtering into their apartments.
Carey and Baar, who each smoke about a pack a day and run an information technology sales business out of the one-bedroom unit, fought the eviction, arguing in court that the converted warehouse’s shoddy construction and aging ventilation system were to blame for the wayward odors.
Last Friday, a jury ruled in favor of the landlord and the eviction. Even though the landlord could have written a nonsmoking clause into the lease and didn’t, the jury found that the couple’s heavy smoking violated a more general clause banning ”any nuisance; any offensive noise, odor or fumes; or any hazard to health.”
Beware the word any within your contracts.
Of course, this is not so much a smoker’s rights issue as an issue for all of us. Within any of the standard contracts that govern our rights–from the terms of use for our Web hosts, to the service contracts for ISPs or cellular phones, and into the terms of our leases or mortgages, any number of the clauses are written to make the big corporation with the shrewd attorneys and uninformed, gloss-overish salespeople who only want you to sign the standard contract so they can get their commissions. Those corporations won’t renegotiate the finer points with you because you, individual customer, are not worth the trouble.
But when someone wants to cut you out, revoke your lease, or foreclose upon you, they rely upon these nebulous things within the contract stacked against you to do so.
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Arab newspapers urged Britain on Friday not to turn against Arabs and Muslims after bloody bomb attacks in London blamed on al Qaeda Islamist militants.
While all editorials condemned the onslaught, some linked it to Britain’s part in the Iraq invasion or its backing for a U.S.-declared “war on terror,” which, they said, ignores the injustice of occupation fueling militancy in the Middle East.
The Friday prayer preacher in Tehran said Britain, which has said Thursday’s attacks bore the hallmarks of al Qaeda, should remember that Osama bin Laden’s group was a U.S. creation.
Beirut’s English-language Daily Star predicted that Muslims would suffer more discrimination after the carnage in London.
Everyone remember the mosque bombings after 9/11, or the internment? No, me either. So rest assured, Islam, that we in the West can even control our radical outliers in response to the slights and subtle injustice of carnage and thousands of dead innocent bystanders while the majority of the Islam watches silently and probably roots for the radicals in your culture who have, if not your overt support, at least your overt rationalization.
“In spite of the fact that all acts of ‘Islamic’ terrorism blatantly contradict Islamic teachings, such acts serve to further distort the image of Muslims and Islam,” it said.
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If John is as dumb as a sack of hammers, and if Mary is as dumb as a three-quarters-full sack of hammers, who is smarter?
Arithematically, we might express it this way:
JohnIQ = 1s(h)
MaryIQ = .75s(h)
So on the surface, it would look obvious that John is smarter than Mary, but this assumes that the intelligence factor of multiple hammers is measurable in a number greater than 1. However, if each individual hammer actually reduces intelligence, that is, each individual hammer’s contribution to overall intelligence actually detracts from overall intelligence, in which case Mary, by having her intelligence diminished by a smaller number of hammers in the sack, would have the higher intelligence.
Man, I should have taken more, that is to say “any,” mathematics in college. However, as I do hold a degree in English, I can identify quickly within the word problem the patriarchy’s obvious oppression of Mary, wherein she’s only worth three quarters of the hammers of an equivalent male. This realization provides me with enough indignation to determine that to answer this word problem is to support the capitalists that hold Mary down. Also, I need to determine whether the hammers within the sack represent the proletariat and whether, by keeping them in the sack, both John and Mary (Biblical names–ergo Christians) are actually oppressors, but that’s another word problem of its own….
UPDATE: For my gentle European and Canadian readers working on this problem, I’d like to point out that 1 sack of hammers (SoH) is equal to 2.54 boxes of rocks (BoR), the metric measurement.
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London attacks fuel debate over U.S. transit security:
Debate erupted Thursday over federal funding for U.S. mass transit security after four bombs in London ripped through several commuter subway trains and one bus, killing at least 37 people and injuring hundreds more.
So heavily-subsidized, under-used transportation concerns (Amtrak, metro rail programs, and so on) need more subsidies to handle their security. Which should be a standard feature of the service or a risk assumed by the consumer, I would expect.
I suppose the alternative is providing an unimpeachable and unavoidable extension of the TSA to cover these public/private companies. No word on when the Federal government will begin providing additional security for restaurants, shops, and other soft targets, but it will probably follow the realization that these groups can band together to lobby to push off another cost of business onto the taxpayer.
(Link seen on Law, Terrorism and Homeland Security.)
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Evan Hunter, who wrote Ed McBain detective series, dies at 78:
Evan Hunter, who wrote the Ed McBain 87th Precinct detective series as well as novels including “The Blackboard Jungle,” died of cancer of the larynx, his agent said. He was 78.
The world is somewhat darker without the possibility of a new 87th Precinct novel. However, with a backlist of over 50 books, we have plenty of good reading to revisit.
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